Swift's “Skinnibonia”: A New Poem from Lady ... - Lafayette College

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James Woolley
The poem’s prelude (ll. 1-6) addresses Skinnibonia directly, glancing at her dark
complexion and referring, I think superciliously, to Sir Arthur’s recent appointment
as high sheriff of County Armagh.29 Next, the first main part of the poem (ll. 7-
30) describes Lady Acheson’s kinetic gestures, much as they are described in
other Market Hill poems: she fidgets, she scratches herself, she “jogs” her feet. If
Skinnibonia had had any flesh under her skin, the “spirits quick” in her “dang’rous
head” could have resulted in “Libels on the Dean and Knight” or indeed in sedition
(“factions in the state”), so on balance, all her “motion” is a “Happy” thing. At
a time when plumpness was considered healthy, there is an element of concern
for her health in the reference to her leanness, and this concern also accounts for
Swift’s repeated efforts to enlist her in exercise, for the sake of strengthening her
heart, lungs, and stomach.30
Apparently, in the Acheson household, a relaxed and freewheeling spirit of
flirtatious raillery thrived, and apparently Swift and Lady Acheson happily identified
each other as the two with the quickest spirits. Or as Swift explained (or boasted)
to Sheridan a month later, “My Lady is perpetually quarrelling with Sir Ar——
and me, and shews every Creature the Libels I have writ against her.”31 When
this poem was written, Swift was 60 and Lady Acheson was probably about 35;
Sir Arthur was 40. The Achesons had been married for about 13 years and had
several children.32 Swift licenses the flirtation by repeatedly allying himself with Sir
Arthur. Lady Acheson loved these attentions—as Lord Orrery found to his surprise
in 1732 when she invited Swift and him to dinner and read him Swift’s seemingly
uncomplimentary poem, “Death and Daphne.” Orrery politely “protested” that
Daphne could not have been meant for her, but, as Orrery tells it,
29 In January of 1728. See Dublin Weekly Journal, 20 January 1728; cited Johnston-Liik, History of the
Irish Parliament, III, 53.
30 Poems, ed. Williams, III, 853. Swift also finds fault with her diet: Poems, ed. Williams, III, 853, 897,
doubtless remembering that Esther Johnson was very lean in the months before she died in January
1728. See The Poems of Thomas Sheridan, ed. Robert Hogan (Newark: University of Delaware Press,
1994), p. 166. Lady Acheson died in 1737; Pat Rogers suspects that she was consumptive (see Jonathan
Swift: The Complete Poems, p. 820; hereafter cited as Poems, ed. Rogers). Ehrenpreis offers the same
suggestion (see Dean Swift, p. 602n).
31 Swift to Sheridan, 18 September 1728, Correspondence, ed. Woolley, III, 194.
32 The Achesons married in 1715: John Lodge, The Peerage of Ireland, rev. Mervyn Archdall, 7 vols
(Dublin: Moore, 1789), VI, 82. Archdall shows that the Achesons had seven children: five sons,
Nicholas (buried 1717), Philip (buried 1727), Archibald (born 1718), Thomas-Philip (died young),
and Arthur (married 1753), and two daughters, Anne (married 1742) and Nichola (married 1746).
Archibald was the eldest surviving son. The burial dates come from G. E. C., The Complete Baronetage,
II (Exeter: Pollard, 1902), 335. Nora Crow Jaffe’s estimate of Lady Acheson’s age seems reasonable:
Jaffe, “Swift and the ‘agreeable young Lady, but extremely lean,’ ” Contemporary Studies of Swift’s
Poetry, eds John Irwin Fischer and Donald C. Mell Jr (Newark: Delaware University Press, 1981),
p. 150.